Groovy: XML without the bloat

Flexible strings

Common Topics

Hands on, part 1 You may find this hard to believe, but there was a time before XML hell, when the idea was that XML was going to solve just about every tricky problem in software development. From swapping data between applications or platforms, to storing complex data structures in a portable format - XML was the answer.

Growing up around the same time as XML was Java, which - like XML - has since gone on to shape an industry. If we’re honest, though, it’s never been an easy relationship between these two. Processing XML in Java is a common enough requirement, but it can be extremely verbose, requiring plenty of boilerplate code and all kinds of extraneous scaffolding that obscures what are often very straightforward functions.

That’s where Groovy comes in. As befits a young scripting language for the Java Virtual Machine, Groovy can do XML in a way that is relatively free of bloat and allows the developer to focus on the real problem at hand. In this two-part tutorial I shall look at how Groovy can help in reading and writing XML documents. You can find instructions on installing and running Groovy here, or you can refer back to my earlier article.

At some time or other we’ve probably all written code that just uses strings to write out a fragment of XML. It’s cheap but clunky, but it saves having to instantiate a DOM tree or any of that fiddly stuff. Groovy’s flexible strings allow us to do this very, very simply.

Here’s how we create a fragment of XML that contains a list of names each in an element called "hello", and each with an order attribute:

But that’s only a bunch of strings, there’s no XML declaration, and certainly no way it can be processed as XML. If we do need to turn this into a DOM tree, we can do that easily enough too. Let’s make our hello elements children of a root element called "names" and then turn it into a DOM tree that we can interrogate:

It should be clear by now that the combination of Groovy’s convenience methods (from the groovy.xml.* libraries), iterators and powerful string handling capabilities make for very succinct code for creating XML from relatively straightforward data. While the equivalent Java code would take a lot more typing - which wouldn’t be half as readable and easy to follow - so far there’s nothing tremendously taxing here.